A NATION CHALLENGED: THE LETTER

A NATION CHALLENGED: THE LETTER; Fear Hits Newsroom In a Cloud of Powder

By JUDITH MILLER

Published: October 14, 2001

It looked like baby powder. A cloud of hospital white, sweet-smelling powder rose from the letter -- dusting my face, sweater and hands. The heavier particles dropped to the floor, falling on my pants and shoes. An anthrax hoax, I thought.

My mind had been on something else. At my desk at The New York Times, I was already focused on what I thought was going to be the story of the day: the Bush administration's effort to seize the assets of more people and groups it said supported terrorism. It was after 9:15 a.m. on Friday, and Treasury Secretary Paul H. O'Neill would soon begin discussing the list of 39 additions to his agency's roster of rogue financiers of terror. I was on the phone, talking to Jeff Gerth, my colleague and friend, about the article we were planning to write. As we spoke, I was picking my way through the pile of unopened mail beside my computer.

I had been getting many letters since Sept. 11. Some were complimentary; others were angry about the government's failure to protect Americans from terrorism. But most writers wanted to know how they could protect themselves and their families from bioterrorism, having seen two colleagues and me on television discussing our book, ''Germs: Biological Weapons and America's Secret War.''

Had I not been distracted, I probably would not have opened the stamped letter in the plain white envelope with no return address and a postmark from St. Petersburg, Fla. My sources and I had been discussing the threat of anthrax attacks ever since the death of a man this month who contracted an inhaled form of the disease at a newspaper office in Boca Raton, Fla. -- not far from where one of the hijackers of the Sept. 11 attacks had done his flight training.

But I wasn't thinking. I was rushed, absorbed in my work, and only half paying attention to the mail.

The powder got my full attention. I immediately asked the reporters and editors around me to call security. I didn't want to touch the phone.

They looked alarmed. It's O.K., I told them. It's probably just a hoax.

Just then the phone rang. Instinctively, I pressed the headphone button. It was a source. Had I heard, he asked, about Tom Brokaw's assistant? She had contracted anthrax from powder in a letter she opened in late September.

The envelope, he said, had a Florida postmark.

Calm down, I thought. It's still probably a hoax. But when The Times security officials arrived -- promptly -- I was relieved to see that they were carrying a plastic garbage bag and wearing gloves. As I moved away from the desk, they gingerly placed the letter and envelope in the bag, and sealed it, along with the glove that had touched them. Perfect, I thought.

As I washed my hands and tried to dust off the powder that clung to my pants and shoes, I thought about what Bill Patrick, my friend and bio-weapons mentor, had told me: anthrax was hard to weaponize. To produce a spore small enough to infect the lungs took great skill. Bill knew that firsthand. He had struggled to manufacture such spores for the United States in the 1950's and 60's as a senior scientist in America's own germ weapons program, which President Richard M. Nixon had unilaterally ended in 1969.

Growing anthrax that would penetrate the skin -- cutaneous infection, it was called -- was less difficult, though still not easy.

That's why Bill had been very concerned when he heard about the Florida case. Whoever had done this had been able to produce the tiny spore of roughly one to five microns that could enter the lungs.

The other cases, Bill told me, could well have involved a larger spore that was cut with baby powder or another substance to mask the deadly pathogen with a smell that was reassuringly familiar. Anthrax itself had no smell. And it was almost never white.

By now, I was no stranger to this deadly agent. My education had started with Bill Patrick's demonstration of how easily anthrax could be slipped past airport security. Bill had shown me how the fine powder in the small vial he kept on his desk dissolved like magic into the air when the vial was shaken and poured. Since 1998, I had been touring the laboratories and plants that had been part of the Soviet Union's vast germ empire. I had visited the decaying laboratories in once secret cities and interviewed some of the tens of thousands of Soviet scientists who had worked to perfect mankind's most vicious, efficient killers. I was now familiar with the stench of such places -- the haunting mix of bleach, dust, animal waste -- the smell of death.

The research had terrified me at first. Not even the terrorism I had covered as a Times correspondent in the Middle East in the 1980's had so unnerved me. But I had remained, through it all, detached from the reality of my often awful subjects. To do our work, journalists had to be. We were trained to be the cool, professional observers that our business requires and readers demand.

Yet now I was no longer covering a story. I was the story.

Returning to my desk, I was determined to remain calm. Or at least appear calm. If my exquisitely observant colleagues felt that one of their in-house experts was frightened, they, too, might lose their professional cool.